March twenty-seventh, twenty-ten

In this, a rare moment of calm before work, I am sipping slowly on a cup of coffee and gazing out the back window in the dining room, trying to catch glimpses through bush branches of what’s going on in the back yard. Ever since I decided to battle the raccoon by only putting the feeder out while I’m at home and awake, my hungry bird population has plummeted. It makes for a quieter and less expensive existence, but I’ll be honest: I miss watching the bird fights that get going when there are thirty or so winged ones out there fighting over six feeder perches. Birds can be mean as snakes. The morality play is made even more amusing by the squirrels that gather beneath the feeder for the seeds that inevitably drop when one bird is picked off a perch by another.

But right now? There’s a lone squirrel on the roof of the shed, waiting. I think he knows there’s a deadline.

•••

I spent part of the morning at the Mid-South Baby Expo with Courtney and her mom and little baby Daphne bug, who spent her time wisely, napping in a sling just beneath Courtney’s chin. We perused the vendor booths and saw a lot of cute stuff, a lot of useless stuff, and a shit ton of pregnant ladies. I imagine everyone around me will be pregnant until I turn 40 or so. It takes some getting used to. But I suppose it’s the most natural thing in the world.

I’m coming around, I think. I don’t get a squeal-filled charge out of baby clothes or super expensive plastic vomit-repelling diaper bags like a lot of women apparently do, but I do have a super sappy spot in my heart reserved for the idea of growing a little family and spending some quality time with a quirky little human who carries a capsule of DNA inside her that was pulled from a place in me that I would have otherwise not known existed. Traits from great-great-great grands I’ve never met could show up in a little one and square dance with those of the ancestors of my lover. What a wild thing to contemplate. I imagine that once you’ve made that leap, it’s hard to imagine ever having not. I’m still on this side of the canyon, listening for some trace of confidence in the echo. Nope. Not there yet.

•••

These things taste like Crunch Berries. Which is to say they are awesome.

•••

This is the face of evil that destroyed some of my favorite posters last night. He apparently spent the evening trapped in my bedroom closet, where I was keeping the posters so that, everyone say it with me, he wouldn’t destroy them. Sigh.

Now that those evil posters won’t be threatening his freedom anymore, he’s decided to stalk and destroy the flowers I brought home Wednesday night. I hid them in the bathroom the first night so that he would forget about them; when I first walked in the door with them and he realized there were fresh blooms to be consumed, he went NUTS and got a crazed look in his eye and charged at me, looking straight at them. They’ve been on the top shelf of the black bookshelf in the living room, sort of behind a few things so he wouldn’t notice them. That is, until earlier today when I moved that stuff out of the way so I could see them more easily. Then he noticed them. And he has, between bouts of coming over and trying to splay on the very keyboard on which these words were written as they were being written, been working the nearby windowsills to get closer to them.

They’re going back in the bathroom when I leave.

•••

You can see I’ve fallen victim to the Hipstamatic charm, too. I’m a sucker for a $2 toy.